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Tavern patrons in San Diego, California watch Donald Trump and Joe Biden debate on October 20, 2020
Photo by Mike Blake/REUTERS
President Joe Biden's campaign pulled a fast one on former President Donald Trump's team, according to the co-founder and co-chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD).
In a recent interview with Politico, Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. — the former chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC) who has helmed the CPD for several decades — insisted the CPD was still alive and well despite the two campaigns going around his organization to hold their debates. The CPD chief did a combination of pushing back against the Biden team's assertions that its scheduled September and October general election debates were held too late in the election season, and praise for Biden's reelection campaign for managing to get Trump to agree to terms that were not the most favorable for the ex-president.
Fahrenkopf described the Trump team's acceptance of two general election debates hosted by CNN and ABC News "political malpractice," noting that the ex-president should have read the fine print before signing on the dotted line.
"Donald makes decisions like this and I’m not sure he listens to the staff," he said. "And I don’t think he ever saw all of the details that were in there. And that is a pretty spectacular job by the Biden people."
One of the major sticking points Biden's team wanted for both debates was not having a crowd present. An unnamed Biden aide speaking anonymously told Politico that because "Trump feeds off the crowd" and that cheering supporters "give him life," they demanded the debate room be empty save for the two candidates and the moderators.
"We wanted to take that away," the aide said.
Other demands Biden wanted that Trump agreed to included microphones that can be muted if a candidate speaks out of turn, and having moderators who didn't have a pro-Trump bias. That second demand sparked outrage from Fox News, with several of the networks prominent hosts worrying that CNN and ABC moderators would fact-check Trump while he was in mid-sentence.
Aside from the terms of the debate themselves, Trump may also not perform well due to his relative lack of experience. The former president hasn't debated since 2020, when he and Biden squared off in a shouting match that moderator Chris Wallace helplessly failed to control as Trump continuously interrupted his opponent. He notably did not participate in any of the Republican primary debates hosted by the RNC, and usually held competing events on nights his rivals debated.
In the two debates, which will take place in June and September, Biden will likely hammer the former president on his embrace of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that allowed for legal abortions. Republicans have yet to notch a win in any election when abortion is on the ballot — even in typically red states like Kansas, Kentucky and Montana. Biden is also aiming to highlight Trump's multiple threats to democracy in the upcoming debates.
Fahrenkopf told Politico that even though the CPD likely won't get to host a general election debate this cycle, that he hopes the Biden-Trump debates on CNN and ABC will be informative and educational for voters.
"We were created for one purpose and one purpose only... we want to make sure in every presidential election cycle that the man or woman who wants to be president or vice president of the United States debates their opponents. That’s our purpose," he said. "Now, if the Biden and Trump campaigns can reach some agreement and go forward with two debates, and that happens and they do a good job? That’s the only thing we exist for. I don’t get anything out of this in any other way. What happens to the debate commission thereafter, I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see."
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
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Lauren Boebert
Even the most far-right members of the House Republican Conference are condemning Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's (R-GA) hijacking of a recent committee hearing.
During a Thursday night meeting of the House Oversight Committee, members were debating legislation to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt when Greene suddenly insulted Rep. Jasmine Crockett's (D-TX) "fake eyelashes." This resulted in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) coming to Crockett's defense, demanding that Greene's words be struck from the record and for the Georgia Republican to apologize. Crockett asked committee chair Rep. James Comer (R-KY) if, hypothetically, she would be in the wrong for mentioning that a certain member of the committee had a "bleach blonde, bad built butch body."
Crockett recounted the incident in an interview with The Daily Beast, saying that Greene's comment about her eyelashes was "absolutely a racist thing."
"Any woman that knows anything about makeup and getting done up knows that eyelashes are one of those things that kind of come with it," she said. "MAGA has been trolling on social media for a while and it’s a way of them basically calling me ghetto and things like that, because of my hair and my lashes and my nails."
"It’s almost like, well, we don’t have anything intelligent to counter that with. So instead, we’ll be racist and we’ll attack her and go after her looks. Which, frankly, I am not lacking in my confidence about my looks…. but they do it all the time," she added. "So I think this was just a fundraising ploy for her and it’s also just her brand. Her brand is chaos and ignoring the rules."
The only Republican on the Oversight Committee to vote with Democrats to silence Greene for the remainder of the hearing was Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who has publicly squabbled with Greene in the past. Boebert suggested the far-right Georgia congresswoman was making other Republicans look bad with her behavior.
"It was embarrassing what was going on," Boebert said on Capitol Hill. "I couldn’t bring myself to stand in defense of that, I wouldn’t do it for the other side."
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) also weighed in on the fracas, saying Greene's outburst was "not a good look for Congress."
The Oversight Committee eventually approved the contempt resolution against Garland, in response to the attorney general refusing to hand over audio recordings of President Joe Biden's conversations with former Department of Justice special counsel Robert Hur. After concluding his investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents, Hur declined to charge the president with any crimes.
Ocasio-Cortez later tweeted that the resolution was approved notably without any votes on any amendments, which she characterized as an extraordinary breach of the legislative process on Comer's part.
"You see, this is the microcosm of what authoritarians do on a larger scale," she wrote. "ID a vulnerable person/community that’s easier to break the rules towards, normalize it (often w/ “both sides” rhetoric), and then use that rule-breaking to undermine deeper processes and rule of law."
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
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